Category: Vehicles

The job cuts come as the demand for trucks has slowed since the first years of the pandemic and as the company shifts its operations to meet increasing regulations for engine emissions.

Wonder how much diesel engine tech transfers to building electric motors?

It also hasn’t been washed in like a year again but I did manage to put new wheels and tires on it a few weeks ago. The Blizzaks® are great snow tires and came in real handy a few times last season, but other than that, they suck. After a scary episode at Big-O with those last fall, I decided to just get new wheels again and push through the swaps on my own. One was already slightly bent from the potholes around here anyway.

The tire monkeys at Big-O somehow managed to get the centering rings misfit and sent me home with a steering wheel wobbling like all the balancing weights fell off before I left the parking lot. It was a stressful situation getting cleared up the next morning. I’d rather just spend my own labor all morning doing them one-at-a-time, with long breaks in between.

Good engineering can be a real double-edged sword sometimes. Everything is a compromise of some sort. Always in weight-conservation mode, I usually err on the wrong side of strength, designing truck parts. Real-world testing is really the only way to know if something works right and lasts long, so I tend to break alot of the stuff I make, in a seemingly never-ending development spiral. The Tourqelinks were obviously, no exception..

Clutch chatter suddenly returned one day after it caught traction spinning up onto the road during a bumpy mudhole turnaround. Inspection revealed catastrophic failure on both bars. Passenger side was bent and the driver side front mount was completely broken off. They must be doing something, because that was a 5/8 inch bolt. We’ll see how 3/4 grade 8 does. Weak links (literally) finally exposed. Getting those things drilled and tapped by hand was a freakin’ nightmare.

I knew at the outset in this iteration, the bars themselves might be a weak point. They started as just light-duty electrical conduit. The angular force in this application is obviously not quite straight forward, so they got reinforcements welded in for a considerable beef-up. It’s also possible the mount breakage was bad welding on my part, so I left the other front mount alone, for the time being. They’re now sporting safety catches up front to keep them off the ground in case those mounts remain short on the strength values.

In today’s VM-heavy IT world, it’s like the old server-room adage: There’s no substitute for hardware. I been telling people it’s an honest 12’s car with the right driver and rear diff. All I can say about this one is thank gawd for electronic traction control, or I’d have been gone long ago. I got run down at the finish too, in the only race I lost with it. The insane torque delivered by these things put them ahead off the line every time they hook.

I’ll temporarily rescind my ongoing uToob® link-back policy, to support that claim, since it appears they have rescinded the ad-blocker policy. Good for them. It’s better organizing ur own viewing anyway. Instead of going after the ad-blockers, they’re just inserting them in-stream. Kinda sucks the 2nd half of clips won’t get watched, but it is a time-saver and at least I can see my history!

We’ll see how it goes…

There’s one in the Bimmer. Horaitu’s article scratches the “comprehensive” surface. I have to admit falling into the M57 purely by chance. We needed another car after the girls started driving. Perusing Car-and-Driver one day, I happened across a gushing review of the then new 6-pot diesel BMW had recently foisted upon an un-suspecting driving public here in the USA. Found a good used example down in Castle Rock, initially appalled and eventually amazed after finishing up the roadworthy mods it needed, because BMW nearly choked it to death with emissions controls.

I’ve become more-or-less familiar with a few engines over the years, certainly nothing near a representative cross-section of what all’s available. But there’s a feel for the moving parts and clatter emanating from one of these things, regardless of who designed it. The M57 exudes the most buttery smooth quiet (for a diesel!) mechanical serenade I’ve ever come across, with unparalleled efficiency and power wholly uncharacteristic of an oil-burner. Properly tuned sans emissions equipment, the car runs 42MPG at 70MPH nominal, pumping out around 600 foot-pounds of torque with zero twin-turbo lag – a true wolf in sheep’s clothing. Best part: After tooling around down in Texas for a week last month, clocking 160k miles now, feels like it’ll probably outlast me, at this point.

Gearheads gotta race everything. I’m guilty as the next guy. Longmont Popo got me at 78 in a 55 couple weeks ago in the old Dodge. He was complaining about the black smoke, too. I just looked real surprised and said “78?!! I didn’t know this thing would go that fast!” It does have 4.10 gears, so plausible in factory trim with stock-sized tires. He was cool about it. White privilege, baby – I’m milkin’ it! 😉

The analysis of Tesla’s own promotional material and additional information obtained by Engineering Explained via MotorTrend refutes Tesla’s Cybertruck performance claims entirely, implying that Tesla is misrepresenting the performance of its electric pickup to potential buyers.

I would assume it’s not the only thing they are misrepresenting.